Courants d'air — Personal Musings and Reflections

I was always a good student, so good in fact that I disastrously destroyed the curve which could have saved several of my classmates over time from being grounded at home. I graduated valedictorian from my high school class.I went on to get not one but a small handful of university degrees, becoming so educated that I have even had potential employers tell me that I was “over-qualified” for certain jobs (to which I replied of course, “Oh, so you are purposely looking for someone underqualified?” or “I should certainly hope that EVERYONE is over-qualified to stock your shelves and run your cash register!”)

I, like many other good students, went on to become an educator because of some notion I had gotten in my head that education is everything—that education is the pathway to a bright future and personal fulfillment, that education represents the only true way to achieve the American Dream, that education is liberation and freedom. I have believed so strongly that language is the key to achieving power and that good communication is the route toward conflict resolution (this was even the subject of my Valedictory Address twenty-six years ago) that I have been teaching French, Spanish, and English as a Second Language to students at all levels for the past twenty-two years.

But what sends me to my keyboard this morning?Change.I am considering putting my years of experience in the classroom to a new purpose and mission.I am contemplating shifting the focus of my career and leaving the lectern in the next semester or two, and am wrestling with the idea of not being in a classroom, either as a student or as a teacher, for the first time in almost forty years.I am not worried.I am not sad.It is just change and I am sure that my efforts to be of service to others will be rewarded if I decide to move on to something new.I am also wrought though with questions like, “Have I made any difference?” or “Have I wasted my time?”Given what has been said about teachers, and the teaching profession over the last number of years, I am sure you understand from where my apprehension comes.

I spent my early career in a variety of private and public high schools in New Jersey, Maine and Virginia where I served alongside consummate educators full of patience and compassion.I was ‘in the struggle’ with mental health professionals at a facility for deeply troubled youth where I listened to the stories of a child who had thrown himself off the top of a four-story barn, breaking nearly every bone in his body upon impact with the frozen ground below, because he was trying to escape a different kind of pain—abandonment by his parents.I have willingly helped an adolescent man, deaf since birth, secure a box of condoms at the local pharmacy so that he could work the girls in his class to a hormonal frenzy with his charm and handsome physique. So confident was he that when I asked him why he needed my help in that small New England town full of judgmental Puritans, he replied, “I may be deaf, but I know those girls can ‘hear’ me!”

My later career has been spent teaching adults in night classes at a local technical college.While I am certainly qualified to be giving classes at a larger university to better prepared students, I have long enjoyed working with adults seeking to retool their careers or younger less affluent adults who have seen that level of education as a way to save money, make progress towards a larger goal, and still be able to balance the stresses of raising children of their own with the expectations of employers and educators.Some, like ‘Miss Pink Pants’ who ripped me to shreds in front of a colleague only to later request that I write her the same kind of glowing recommendation that I had for one of her classmates, have been pugnacious; I declined to write that letter. Others have been apathetic, leaving so little impact on me that years later, I have struggled to recall more than the person’s face.You know that student.He is the one who approaches you at the mall and you have to resort to generic questions such as “What have you been doing since you finished your studies?” so as not to appear rude by not remembering.Others have been highly motivated and gone on to accomplish great things—and I am grateful to facebook for helping me stay in touch with them.I count a doula and midwife, a lawyer, a medical researcher, a social worker, a pharmacist-in-training, a teacher, and a housewife, among many, in my list of forever friends, once students.Only a very small handful have actually gone on to study French or Spanish further, and they, like me, all felt that they were using language like a superpower.My hope is, however, that all have left my classroom empowered to see their own future in a different light. My desire has always been that while they may no longer speak or use the language skills I was directly teaching, that my students have the skills to break down texts which are more complicated than they can readily understand at first glance and see that in the grammar lies understanding of the larger meaning; that my students learned to see the world differently, through the cultural lens of another; that they simply learned that no matter where someone comes from in the world that our problems are the same and that by working together we can resolve those issues and understand each other better.My wish is, as a Togolese student recently told me, that I have been able to be compassionate with my students because I have taken the time to imagine my life were I to have been in their shoes; that, as a Somali student said, I have indeed been the best teacher I can be.

Change.I am contemplating using my talents in other ways after realizing that the public discourse that has led people to decry teachers as ‘glorified babysitters’ has led public policy in a direction which has left me after twenty-two years with nary a few thousand dollars in my retirement; I am grateful that a friend who passed away a decade ago left me his home, which I consider my paid-up future.The same people who have claimed that ‘teachers only work a few months of the year’ have created a system where someone with as much education as I have is monitored and supervised in ways no other profession would tolerate.In short, teaching is one of those jobs at which everyone feels she could do better, just because she had previously been in a classroom as a student herself.Nothing could be further from the truth.It takes years to learn to be a great teacher.And, as I ponder leaving the profession, I think to myself, “But you are just getting good at this!”I also then recollect that, at times, the only thing left challenged in that work is my patience.I wonder too that if I leave now, when I am at what feels like the top of my game, will I be depriving others in some way?I hope the future students who I won’t work with will understand.

But there is so much more to teaching than preparing a perfectly chronometered lesson plan, than the ability to elegantly decorate a learning environment (from one’s personal treasure since we as a society have not yet placed value on these things through an honest budget process), than just showing up to work.While I have perfected how to present the intricacies of the temporal forms of the indicative past in three languages, the parts of my score of years in a school room which I cherish the most have nothing at all to do with the actual act of teaching a foreign language, but rather the personal connections I have made with students over the years.The parts of my job which have affected me the most profoundly have been those moments when I have touched upon the uniquely universal and singularly human aspects of people’s lives.

–I’ve shouted, “Stop.Just Stop!” at the mother of a severely anorexic child.I felt compelled to get this woman to think for a moment that her unrealistic desire for her daughter to go to Harvard, when the child wanted to go to the local university to study to become a kindergarten teacher, may in fact be the cause of her daughter’s severe illness.I shook that mother by the shoulders and beseeched her to allow her daughter to not only get treatment for her illness but to also chart her own path for the future.I warmly took that same mother’s hand and let her know that she was understood.(After, almost two years of family counseling and a lengthy in-patient stay for the daughter. the Mother tracked me down to mail me a thank you note. I may, as she stated in her punctilious script, have saved all of their lives in one way or another.)

–I’ve volunteered time to teach students how to be culturally aware so that they would, in turn, be able to help small communities in Latin America change lives through dental hygiene lessons, building losa stoves to dramatically change the sorts of women in remote villages who one had to stoop long hours over a pit fire to cook for their families.

–I’ve risked my job through what may have been perceived as “inappropriate contact” (offering a good and solid hug, the kind you don’t let go from) in order to keep a student’s world from spinning off its axis and falling in to the deep darkness of outer space. The girl’s mother and brother were murdered in a carjacking that day and she was suddenly an orphan and alone.

–I’ve sat Shiva with the family of a young man who perished as a result of severe hypothermia when his bipolar disorder told him he should walk the rails from Central Maine to Canada in subzero weather.He had been a gifted math student with visions of changing the world one day for all of us.Seven days with his disbelieving father by my side changed me.

–I bullied two young men in to behaving more responsibly by relying on some of my brother’s former (reprobate) friends to give me information about the students’ drug use.By accessing information about who their dealer was, how much he was charging, and threatening to share that information with those in power to make their lives far worse, I was able to get their attention and keep it. What they really wanted was for someone to give a hoot about them, and to hear their story. Much to the administrator’s surprise, they were fine students of French, when I was done with them.

–I’ve listened to the pleas of a distraught mother, unable to bring stability to her daughter’s existence, as she asked me to give up my Saturdays to take Swing Dance lessons with that daughter so that her child could be assuredly safe and unable to do harm to herself.By the end of our lessons, we were pretty slick dancers, if I say so myself.

–I’ve pulled a free-lunch fourth-grader on to my lap to ask him why he did not always come to school.He had at eleven in the morning sped up the school’s driveway on his flashy red bicycle, and entered my classroom with a certain level of fanfare.“Don’t hassle me, Teach!” he declared over his shoulder as he took off his knapsack, “I am only here for lunch.”While he had no one to make sure he got to school every day to learn, he did know where a good hot meal, the only one he would get that day, could be found.The truancy officer I made contact with during my planning period helped the family view the little guy’s education a bit more amply.

–I’ve tried everything to calm a distressed nine year old, up to and including calling his mother to come fetch him from school.The next morning, when I inquired as to how he was doing, was met with the utmost of serious tones:“I don’t know how you do it!Every day.Every day there is something new to learn!” he uttered.It is good to recognize one’s own limits.

–I’ve endured the plaintiff sobs and crocodile tears of students wishing to manipulate their way to a good grade rather than do the hard work required to be successful.“When you are all done being a martyr,” I have said, “come back and join us.”A martyr indeed, said one a few years later after she had completed her degree, “I thought you were such a bastard that night, but I have come to realize that you were right.The only one suffering was me, and it was my own fault.”

–I’ve read a personal essay, written as a classroom exercise, so disturbingly dark that I invited the student to join me on a walk to meet a friend of mine in the counseling office of the school.It was the end of the summer session, and I never saw that student again, though she did later pen me a letter to tell me that she had been contemplating ending her life that day and that she was grateful that I saw in her pain someone worth saving.She had been admitted to the hospital that afternoon where she remained until her world seemed less bleak.

–I’ve taken that midnight phone call from a student who just lost his father to suicide and who felt he had no other place to turn to make sense of it all.I would later make lunch for the fellow, listen to his story and learn of his special relationship with his dad so that I could, as he wept, compose the eulogy which he would deliver to a crowd of several hundred of his father’s family and friends.

But above all of this, I, like all of the best teachers I have had in my lifetime, offered friendship and caring and in the process learned something about the true meaning of love and family.Fourteen years ago, an elderly gentleman, began my courses hoping to be able to speak to his late Cuban mother in her own language “when he got to the other side”.We remained friends upon his completion of his course of study.Shortly after, when it became apparent that my elderly friend needed extra help with his daily living tasks, he asked if I would serve as his P.O.A.As his level of needs increased, and the authority granted me under the POA was exceeded, I petitioned the Court to become his legal guardian.I saw my friend and student through his dementia to the end of his days.He is now interred in a Florida cemetery next to his beloved Mother.I hope they are chatting it up but good, in her native Spanish, his native English, or just through the kind of love that would push a 78 year-old to study a foreign language in the first place.

It is thanks to this man, at the time some thirty years my senior, that I have a new career path to contemplate following. A few years ago, I decided that it was time to formalize my work as a legal guardian.I began the process that summer to found Wilson Advocacy and Guardianship to provide myself in my work as power-of-attorney and legal guardian with the legal protections afforded like corporations, as well as to formalize many of the processes by which I conduct my business, becoming more professional.As Wilson Advocacy and Guardianship I have undertaken the work of codifying many of my processes. I have sought training with the National Guardianship Association, the Alzheimer’s and Dementia Alliance of Wisconsin, and others to improve the craft of serving as a guardian.And because I can’t seem to get away from teaching entirely, I have offered professional development opportunities to my employees who provide companionship and other services to my clientele.

In my advocacy work, I seek above all to focus on quality of life for my clients.From hiring a Santa Claus to visit the assisted living, to organizing a SuperBowl tailgating party for fifteen older sports fanatics, to arranging for a weekly visit from the library book mobile for an avid reader, I have tried to make the little things in life count for something too.Through person-centered surrogate decision-making in the areas of personal, financial and medical management, I have sought to honor the spirit of what my client would want for him/herself so as to insure that with the right combination of support and opportunity that my client can experience his/her own individual potential, however limited that may be.I strongly desire that my clients actively participate with family, friends and other valued relationships to create a life that is joyful and fulfilled.And most importantly, I still believe that educations empowers, that we can learn new things at any age, and that communication is at the heart of happiness.While a person suffering dementia may not be the one initiating conversation any longer, our job as the people who love and care for that soul is to relearn how we communicate with him.Do we help that person out by holding both sides of the conversation?Do we need to perhaps fill in those words she can’t find?Or perhaps, we need only to sit and be together, smile together, and enjoy the simple pleasure of being with one another.There is a grammar to kindness, and it is far less complicated than the use of fourteen verbal tenses I have been teaching for so long.It takes a subject, a friend; a verb, an act of generosity; and an object, empathy, to make a complete sentence.Abandon your desire to send just a ‘text message’; listen, really listen to each other.Live.Learn. Teach.Words to live by.

As I decide when and how I might exit the stage from classroom teaching, I ask you too to think about those people who have influenced you over time.I have had trained professionals who guided me along the way, and many students from whom I learned a great deal.But how does one say thank you for something like that?I am also wrought with questions like, “Have I made any difference?” or “Have I wasted my time?”If you’ve had someone in your life who has impacted you, send that person a note and let them know it.Hearing that you have helped someone along the way is a surefire way to encourage someone to be helpful to another in the future as well.If I have somehow been that person for you, drop me a line.Assure me that I have fought the good fight and can move on to help others in a different way.I’d love to hear from you if you felt I made a difference.

It’s a sunny day out this morning.The sky is blue and from the sound of the birds in the yard, all is well.In some ways, I suppose it is; in other ways, not so much.My sister, Melissa, has called for the third time in as many weeks with news from home.It hasn’t been good news.About ten days ago, my grandmother’s brother, Arthur, passed away.He was 86 and a longtime resident of Ohio; he had spent much of his working career as a truck driver hauling freight.His wife, Nancy, had called Sherwood, my step-grandfather, to let us know.Nancy and Sherwood are both 81 themselves.Today, Melissa called to let me know that shortly after midnight, Grammy Sweet, Arthur’s older sister and my grandmother, had ended her struggle as well.She had just turned 88 on the twelfth.

Grammy had been ailing for the last number of years.A nick in her vocal cords during a surgery a number of years back left her impaired.Breathing was challenging, swallowing impossible.Conversation with her has been limited in that time.She has had, much to anyone’s delight at a time like this, a faithful and compassionate set of caregivers.Sherwood, who she had married in 1982, has been by her side each and every day.He is heartbroken this morning; his new role as a widower is not one he is likely to accept easily.His brother, Merrill, in a similar situation, will undoubtedly help him through this; I doubt though that it will be easy.Chris McCorrison, Gram’s devoted neighbor, has done so much.There is no way to thank someone for that kind of generosity.Melissa, too, has dedicated much of her energy in the past few years to keeping Gram company, and helping out when Sherwood needed to be absent from the home for a period of hours.She is to be commended for the friendship she brought to that little home on the Hudson Road where my grandparents had retired from farming.

(Melissa has not been having an easy time of it, and so if you have a few extra thoughts and healing energy to share, you are welcome to send some her way.On top of all of this, she lost her cat, Piglet, this week.Piggie, as he was affectionately called, was named for a habit.Piggie loved to eat.In a stroke of irony, he passed away, from an apparent heart attack, sprawled out right there in front of his food dish.There was a bare spot at the bottom of the bowl.That was probably too much for him to bear.We are delighted though that he went doing what he loved the most.Isn’t that something we all want?)

Grammy’s cousin, Robert, who is 93 now, is the last of his generation.His younger brother, Phil, has been gone some 24 years now.Grammy’s younger brother, Ashley, was lost to a tragic accident some years back, and with the passing of Arthur and Marie both this Spring, Robert is all that remains of that generation which survived the Great Depression on rural farms in Maine.We pray for his continued good health, and for that of his lovely wife, Bev.

It’s a sunny day out this morning.The sky is blue and from the sound of the birds in the yard, all is well.We have plans to help Gregory’s aunt rehabilitate a flower bed this afternoon.We may stop at one of the gardening centers and buy some gladiola bulbs, my grandmother’s favorites, to plant and enjoy later this summer in her memory.I love the alter-cloth purple Maine lupine; Gregory is most fond of the blue morning glory.My Mother enjoyed the red rosa rugosa that surrounds so many of Maine’s lighthouses and her Dad, who would have been 101 this year had he survived, enjoyed the pink and white bleeding heart the most.My great grandmother Rowe, named Marion like Mom had been, had lemon lilies in her flower patch, and her father treasured the white Dutchman’s breeches.I’ve some of each of these in my yard.While the neighbors all think we are competing with the local botanical garden, we’re really cultivating memories.Perfectly renewable and restorative nostalgia.Join me, if you will, in planting something beautiful today.Do it in memory of someone you’ve been missing.

My grandmother isn’t well.I am sure she would appreciate your prayers, if you’ve any to spare.Or even just some nice thoughts, really.It isn’t easy being sick.Her husband too would welcome your support.

Grammy Sweet, as we grew up calling her, has led a nice long life.Sweet?Because that was my Mother’s maiden name.Not because of a personality trait.Her name would likely have been Stoic, had that been the root.Grammy was born that spring just before the stock markets crashed in 1929.(She’s an Aries while my sister and me, well, we’re of the more bull-headed Taurus variety from later in the month of April.)Think of how she was sixteen years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; she had no more idea than Grampy, who helped construct the Tinian airstrip which took out Nagasaki, that history of that gruesome sort was about to play out.(Grampy didn’t find out what the airstrip was used for until long after he had returned stateside.)She didn’t have personal contact with the war, in essence.Grammy was not all that helpful when the history teacher sent us kids home with the instruction to interview a survivor of the war.She was, after all, just twelve years old at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; she was just five years old at the beginning of the year that radar was invented.Both changed the world, but she was doing homework and chores.

Grammy was raised, initially any way, on a farmstead now no longer standing, on a road no longer in use, in a small rural town in central Penobscot County.You would not be able to find the place any longer.The logs once used as paving in the soft parts of that road have rotted away and the road itself has been largely reclaimed by scrubby trees.Oh.You can tell the trees are younger than the ones surrounding them, but when there are so many, you have to be paying attention pretty well to understand what time has really accomplished.That old house, where Grammy Sweet was a tike, is today, just a cellar hole that was mostly filled in with rubble some years back.The outline of the house is easiest to spot in springtime because the flower bulbs that my great grandparents left behind when they moved to their larger home at the top of the hill from where I grew up still remain.Daffodils, tulips and snow on the mountain greenery dot the landscape.Dutchman’s breeches and bleeding hearts fill the area under some now large oaks.Some lovely white lilac, and the gladiola bulbs Grammy Rowe (Grammy Sweet’s Mom) loved were brought to the Corinth home on the Marsh Road, as were some of the apple trees and a current bush that got to be the size of a tree when I was young.The grapes, the gooseberries, the rhubarb, they too may have come from Garland at the home where my Grandmother’s Grandparents resided, but it is hard to say with only one left, an elderly cousin of Gram’s, himself now in his nineties, to tell the old stories again.

Grammy Sweet’s upbringing was modest.She was raised in farm country.Her Dad, formerly the town clerk, among other duties he held in town, was the son of a school teacher and took the lessons he learned as a child at his Dad’s insistence and made a hobby of them.He’d sit and calculate math equations for the fun of it, assuredly more challenging than making sure the town’s birth, death and marriage registries were neat, legible and orderly.Her Mom was a strong Baptist woman who kept order in her home and farmette.She didn’t allow for waste, writing on the backs of old envelopes as scrap paper and prohibiting my Mother, in her youth, from “hanging out of the icebox”.Stray emotions were not free range in that household either, from what I have understood over time.Good Old New England stock.Grammy Sweet had a strong work ethic and never suffered from idle hands.She was one of three kids.The eldest.The only daughter.They all worked hard.She would go on to have two kids of her own.

My Grandmother knows a thing or two about devotion and caring.As role models go for relationships, I would say she ranked world class.She was married in 1947 to a farm boy returned from the war, Gene, who admired how nicely she looked bent over in the potato field.They were married some thirty-three years when he passed away in the winter of 1980, the year I was seven, and not long after he had bought me my first ten speed bicycle.A red one.From the Western Auto store.It was a warm Christmas that year.

She was remarried two years later to a different sort of farmer.They have been together ever since.That was thirty-five years ago now.And, if you are doing the math, you have discovered that my Grammy Sweet has spent sixty-eight of her eighty-eight married.She wouldn’t have missed those two in between had she been able to choose.She would have done all seventy.She’s never complained of it though.She has been happy twice, and differently.With her first, she was a Mother, and a generally good one.With her second, she was a farmer’s wife who had a bit more freedom to travel and spend the cold of winter in Florida.Different.Not necessarily better.We have always been grateful to both of the men who have loved her over time.We mourn the first.Her second has his own health travails, but he is by her side day and night and cares for her deeply.You can’t pay for that level of compassion anywhere.He’s a good husband.In short, Grammy celebrated twenty-five years of marriage on two separate occasions.Many can’t manage to get to once.Sadly, I was not able to attend either of her parties.

Grammy Sweet has been since shortly after she was first a bride a member of the Methodist church in town.She never really said, at least not to me, why she left the Baptist Church her mother attended.Her friends, like Helen, were Methodists.I suppose that is what explains it.Grammy dedicated much of her adult life to working with the Couple’s club there.She served countless dinners and suppers at the church.Catered weddings.Hosted funerary luncheons.She bamboozled more than just me with her large pots of hard boiled eggs at the church kitchen.Just come help Grammy peel a few eggs, she said slyly of the small bowl of eggs on the counter near where she and her gal pals gossiped. Oh, my, look how well you did with those.If you take a few more eggs out of that pot, you can show me how well you can do with those too.Do you know how many eggs it takes to prepare a feast for a small town festival?I do.Too many.We should have been watching our cholesterol anyway.She was also a “worthy matron” of her local Order of the Eastern Star.Quite an honor.She made several of her friends quite jealous with that election.

Born nine and one half pounds.Graduated salutatorian of her class where she was in sports (almost unheard of), dramatics, prize speaking and editor of a school publication, she and I had a lot in common that way.We never managed to bond over it all though.I can’t say why.She was one of the town’s very first librarians, holding for many years ‘card number one’; I held card number thirty-four for a spell as a child.I don’t know who has that card now.Those were the days when your card still slid in the back pocket of the book when you checked it out.Perhaps they don’t use cards any longer; I bet they do though.She held jobs as diverse as clerk for a local auto parts store, to school bus driver.She used to do secretarial work for the undertaker, retiring from that job when Clarence appeared to have kicked the inside of his box while she was recording the flowers recently arrived for his funeral.(Turns out that the undertaker’s youngest daughter was getting drum lessons at school.She should have warned Grammy she was going to practice.)

She made the best peanut butter cookies.Criss cross fork design on the top.Golden brown.And, before people started tampering with Tylenol and kids’ Halloween treats, she used to make popcorn balls that were simply to die for:good and sticky!She combined 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup molasses, 1 and 1/2 tbls. butter and 1 tsp vinegar.She brought that to a boil and added 1 tsp. vanilla.Poured over two quarts of popcorn.Stir and from the balls.She got mad when Grampy let us kids help him shell two large pails of peas for dinner, but only end up with about a pint of peas in a small pan.We weren’t allowed to ‘help’ after that.

We’ve not had much of a relationship, Grammy and I, since I left for college.I’ve missed out on that last quarter century.Lots of reasons, I suppose.Stoicism being one of them.My being too much like my Mother, and she in turn “Just like your Father”, as Grammy used to yell at Mom in frustration.We both took the screams as badges of honor.Mom and Me.

I am grateful to the people who have played a larger role in her life though.Neighbor, Christine McCorrison, has been a God-send.Her fresh out of the oven ‘left overs’ have sustained Grammy’s husband throughout Grammy’s long illness.She claims that she does it just because Grammy was the one who introduced her to her church family.The rest of us know it is because Christine has a saintly side we can’t quite appreciate fully.Helen True has given her more than seventy-five years of friendship.Helen Parkhurst, who just lost her husband recently, wishes her well even though they haven’t seen each other in a number of years.There are kind and generous souls out there.I wish I could recognize them all.

With all that said, if you have a bit of extra time for thoughts of kindness and compassion, send a few my Grammy’s way.She sure could use them right now.While she can’t make you a baked good in appreciation, I will gladly send you some of her favorite recipes which sustained us as a family over time instead.And if you run in to any of her friend’s, give them the hug you might have offered Marie.Tell him or her that the hug was from me.

2015 was a different kind of year. We didn’t travel much outside of our neighborhood. We didn’t receive a lot of guests. We didn’t even go out of our way to shop, letting the power of the internet work its magic through the hardworking men and women of the U.S. postal service. What we did do, though, was enjoy just being home and taking part in the little things. What we did do was to use down to a nub an impressive amount of sidewalk chalk, drawing and skipping countless rounds of hopscotch with the neighborhood kids, Priska and Kuno. Those same kids helped us to blow bubbles, large and small, and watch the wind carry them away. We basked in the peace and calm of summer breezes, and we listened to raindrops beat against the plate glass windows. In short, we found a rhythm and pattern to our days that allowed for the small moments to shine; our slow pace this year was a tonic for the soul.
We bravely met the first hints of the waning winter with rakes in hand. So anxious were we to see the snow melt that we helped it along, pulling the piles down little by little, observing the ice crystals as they seeped in to the lawn or formed rivulets on the sidewalk as they made their way to the storm drains which feed Lake Monona, only a number of yards away. The previous autumn, we had undertaken one of those huge gardening projects that is required every few years to make sure the hosta plants are thinned and that the ever-spreading day lilies get placed back behind their borders. We transplanted bulbs in the hopes that the squirrels would leave them in the ground long enough for them to burgeon and become spring blooms. Impatient to be outside, we cleared the area where the blue Adirondack chairs sit, spread out some cardboard so as not to mar the ground as we luxuriated on those above freezing afternoons and welcomed the vernal warmth back.

Our yard is full of life. Over the months, our Adirondack thrones permit us to eavesdrop on the comings and goings of the world around us. The robins tug worms out of the ground; the yellow finches perch upside down on the heads of sunflowers and eat until their bellies are full. Monarch butterflies and honey bees gathered plentifully on the zinnias. And, then there were those ‘friends’ we invited in to our lives, getting to know them one page at a time.
James adventured out with Andres Viestad to taste the flavors and the spices that Marco Polo encountered on his journeys; he set out on the high seas with the likes of Herman Melville and Mark Kurlansky, not so much to capture the Great White Whale, but rather to pay homage to the lowly cod fish so treasured by the Basques. Tranquilly he listened to Nancy Houston recount tales set to the harpsichord tones of Johann Sebastien Bach. And he lamented to decline of our English language with Steven Pinker and celebrated the polyphonic conditional tense of French and the complexities of the indicative past of Spanish with Pierre Patrick Haillet and Maria Luz Gutierrez, both of Middlebury renown.

Under a new hemlock green cantilevered umbrella in the yard, thus making sure that the heat of the day is blunted and those with thinning hair are not burned, Gregory reclined on fire engine red and sunflower yellow cushions and was consumed with a tome covering a twelve-year period starting in 1788. He visited the Potemkin villages, symbols of the imperial power of Catherine the Great and cringed in horror along with the peasantry of the French Revolution as Louis XVI lost his head. Positioned under the sugar maple of our yard, a wave of nostalgia led him to re-read the Ian Fleming series on James Bond which he had first read under the large oak tree back at his family home as a boy. All of this is to say that we aren’t at a loss when asked to give recommendations on a good read.
Good reads and good eats go so marvelously well together. One never knows what might be happening in James’ kitchen, though. And if Gregory isn’t careful, James’ list of “secret ingredients” (those things that Gregory claims to hate, but James sneaks in to the food anyway because of their umami qualities) appears to be growing.
If he had his druthers, James would be a first-class forager. Our attorney friend, Jennifer, comes to eat about once a month. While she is delighted with the gourmet fare offered here, she has been reluctant to write or to sign a waiver indemnifying James from all loss as a result of his “discoveries”. No matter. A tort is a torte.

Risk taker that he is, James now cooks our meat according to the new USDA recommendations which means that lower temperatures can be used affording safety while enhancing the flavor. Gregory has even caught him vacuum-packing our beef to cook in the gentle waters of a “sous vide”, what looks like a fish tank heater, a rather costly instrument now a favorite of the foodies and the gastro-pornographers he watches on television. He sprinkles the meats with ‘lilac sugar’. Gregory walked in to find James creating this by meticulously removing lilacs pedals and grinding them in sugar. There was a small pile of petals assembled on the table that day and when asked what was happening James smiled and retorted, “Secret Ingredient”. But it wasn’t until James came back from Maine that he truly had Gregory flummoxed. James brought out a bag of birch leaves which his dad and friends, Gary and Barbara, had helped him to gather. The leaves were carefully washed, added to sea salt and pulverized in the food processor. While worrisome, they do make for a most impressive food flavoring.
In late August, James traveled to Maine. It was a busy “working vacation”, the end result of which was a U-Haul pod of stuff being shipped across the country. The pod arrived about ten days after James’ return, delivered to our place by a ‘moving company’, two young men and a mini-van, who didn’t know how to back up with a trailer hitched on. James offered to back the rig up for them, but they declined, preferring to aggravate the entire neighborhood for a pair of hours as they unloaded the pod in to the basement from the center line of Paterson St.
For the first time in years, all of James’ belongings are in one place. Everything from awards and certificates from his childhood to antique rocking chairs that his great-grandmother had rocked ‘the kids’ in, to James’ mother’s collection of crystal dishes and serving pieces were loaded in to that plywood box.

Most impressively though was the new old bed that James brought back from his familial home. In 1977, when ‘the twins’, as he and his sister have been known for much of their lives, needed a new bed, James’ Dad tore a couple of pages from the Sears Catalog to use as inspiration and went to his woodworking shop and built matching ‘Captain’s Beds’, a left and a right, which he modified recently to make one king-sized bed for us to use here. Robert must have been given a router for Christmas 1976, as the wood edges were sculpted and decorative. The Captain’s bed has book shelves in the base and head board and two large drawers for storage on each side. After cleaning them up a bit and reassembling them here in Madison, Gregory now has even more reason to stay upstairs in the event of a tornado or severe weather which would normally send the wise to the basement for cover. He states that he will now just tether himself to the massive and heavy bed and keep on reading.
As you know, we are political junkies and as we tune in to our daily dose of insanity and hate-filled rhetoric from what passes for presidential candidates these days, we try hard to think about what it really means to have a home. It isn’t just the place where we live—it is the whole ensemble of memories and emotions that link us to our pasts. While some would deny others of the chance to establish a home of their own here, we want the US to be a place where others can relish in the simple pleasures of life, where others can hopscotch, read good books, share in meals and friendship, get a good night’s sleep. We wish you a restful year ahead and thank you for being a part of our lives.

“Can I ask you a personal question? I mean… you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to…Really, it will be ok.”

Jeremy stands there looking at me with doubtful countenance. It had been a long day, one in which the only thing that was challenged for me was my patience; and, I still had to look anxiously to driving a wintery forty miles through the woods from the small Maine town where I was a French teacher to home. My car had been having troubles and the prospect of making it without having to test out the new cell phone bought just for that purpose—insurance—was not one to which I looked forward with anticipation.

“No, no problem, go ahead,” I replied with my keys in hand poised to open the car door, hoping sincerely that this encounter was not going to go on all evening. “Ask your question.”

“I have this friend who is coming back to town. Mike is great. We have been best friends for years. He has been away in the military and then stayed out of state for a while but is coming home and has to live with his folks. He isn’t looking forward to that so much, considering he lives here in the sticks like the rest of us; but gosh, am I ever happy. Mike is the greatest.”

“That is great for you Jeremy; I am sure you guys will have a great time together when he arrives” I said, all the while thinking that I had just been trapped and that the day was never going to end. “But you said that you had a question. Were you intending on asking me that question now or later?”

“Oh, sorry.” Not willing to miss his opportunity, Jeremy blurted out his question, “Are you gay?”

Stunned. I was absolutely stunned.

“Well, I must say that is a hell of a question to be asking. Why would you need to know, Jeremy, if I am gay or not? How would knowing something like that about me make a difference in how you learn French?”

Memories of my first day in teaching only three years earlier when my principal sat me down in his office to “explain a few things” suddenly occupied my mind. Jeremy’s question became very secondary to me right then.

There I was, fresh out of graduate school with no experience in front of a classroom, and my principal, a young athletic man in his forties who had managed to become head of campus after only a short while, was telling me that no matter what happens, I was not ever to have contact with a student behind closed doors. “Always keep the door open; and probably it would be best if you arranged your classroom so that your desk were always visible from the door. No students. Not girls or boys. In fact, it might be best if you arranged your meetings in the lounge out here [in front of your classroom], even if it is a bit noisier and less productive.” My eyes must have betrayed me; they read, “Why is he telling me this? What must he think of me?”

He responded to my inquisitive expression by stating matter-of-factly, “James, You are young, single and teach foreign languages.” He paused and gave me a knowing look, except that I didn’t know what he was referring to exactly. When I failed to respond adequately, he continued, “People are going to assume that you are gay, whether you are or not. I mention this for your own good since I think that you are going to be a fine teacher: the people in this school are very litigious. They love a good suit. If you are accused of something, it is hard to disprove a negative. So, just don’t have any closed-door meetings, OK?” Very brief pause. “Well, it was good to have this talk with you. Barb, my secretary will show you out.”

I was escorted out of his office, confused but knowing that I had not come out of any closet in my interview of a few weeks previous, and certainly had not, in my first day of classes, had the chance to lean one way or the other in my discourse. I hadn’t even, in my personal life, come to any conclusion about my sexuality—I only knew that it had been a long time since my last date, which I, of course, attributed to all the work I had been doing.

I was feeling just as stunned then as I was feeling with Jeremy now in front of me, awaiting some discussion.

“Oh, Mr. Wilson, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to ask you that way. Don’t worry I would never tell anyone. Your job wouldn’t be in trouble because of this. It’s just that. Well, it’s just that my friend Mike likes guys and his parents have had a hard time dealing with that. I was just thinking that, if you are, and I am not saying anything, but if you were gay, and could go out with him, and his parents could see you and get to know you… well, I am sure that they would be better with things. Just think about it. Mike is a great guy, like you, and if he could date someone who has gone on to become someone successful and bright, and then maybe they would ease up on him. Mike’s parents aren’t bad people; I just think they are a bit confused. You’d be perfect for them—so they could see that being gay is ok, that they can still love Mike like they used to…”

How do you respond to something like that? First of all, I hadn’t even come out to myself at that point, so I had to wonder what Jeremy sensed that I wasn’t willing to just yet. Secondly, affirming something like being gay to a student of a tiny rural high school could have easily jeopardized my situation at the school, and I was in no position to spend any time unemployed. Not to mention the fact that my then principal had already almost given me a favorable review, attenuated with comments like, “Never turn your backs to the students” and “Be mindful of your surroundings”. (Of course, as a Vietnam veteran, he was having me protect myself from the enemy, which high school kids can often appear to be!) I wasn’t sure how to read his comments yet.

Finally, and more importantly, Jeremy had paid me one of the finest compliments. He thought I was a great guy, and the kind that, if given the chance, parents who want the best for their son would find not only suitable as a companion but also find as an excellent role model.

Jeremy did not press for an answer, but I knew that he felt let down: not so much in me as he felt badly for his friend Mike who was going to have to listen to his parents extol the virtues of the “straight life” when it was already too late for that.

I, of course, spent the evening in quiet taciturn mediation. Why had I gotten myself into teaching in the first place? Underpaid, overworked, forced to confront many issues that had everything to do with my students and that had nothing to do with my subject matter. What was I thinking?

I didn’t need a course to teach me methods of teaching. I didn’t need class work in second language acquisition, as I had experienced all of those things for myself. I also realized that the students didn’t necessarily need someone skilled in foreign languages—after all, living in the deep Maine woods, one is very infrequently called upon to speak something other than English.

What I was challenged to see that day was that my students needed me. They needed an authentic me, ever so much as I also needed that person. I learned, over time, that what the kids in my classroom needed most was a role model. “Teaching from the seat of my pants”, as my friend and mentor had once described it, grew to mean to me that I needed to be willing to give of myself, not just give of my expertise. My students needed to hear, if just for a moment, the path that led me to them.

Indeed, I had let Jeremy down, and wonder how many others too from those first years of teaching. Jeremy was looking for a positive role model, of which he was, and all the other gay kids today continue to be, deprived.

I am not speaking of just “gay” kids; I am speaking about a fisherman’s daughter, a carpenter’s son, a nurse’s son, a postal worker’s daughter. I am speaking about all the kids with whom I have had the pleasure of working. Young people all need good role models and there is no reason why even the gay kids can’t have them, especially when one considers that they are the fisherman’s daughter, the carpenter’s son, the nurse’s son, the postal worker’s daughter. The only thing that keeps them from having the role models they need is the institutionalized hatred that is shown them by administrators who dare to tell new, suspected homosexual, faculty, and “We cannot tolerate gay people working with the kids in our school. The parents would never accept that.” The loathing is cloaked in statements like, “I don’t mind if gay people want to be Boys Scout leaders” while all the while hoping that their child never has to come in contact with one. The hurt comes from hearing fellow students say, “Oh that’s so gay”, to express their dislike of a classroom policy; or any of the other anti-gay slurs that fly by, masked in acceptance, unlike how racial slurs are frowned upon by everyone.

Jeremy was a student different from me, not in that he belonged to a different minority group or that he spoke a different language, or because he was differently-abled. Jeremy was different from me in that he was courageous. He eagerly sought out the role models that he needed to be able to live, assured that his uniqueness as a gay man was really as ordinary as having blue eye, freckles, or being left-handed. I wish I had had that same courage and that I had accepted then his challenge to become the man he had hoped that I could be—a great guy, and the kind that, if given the chance, parents who want the best for their son would find not only suitable as a companion but also find as an excellent role model. I am working on that challenge still.

I love a good book. And I love getting a good deal on one even better. Half Price Books and I have a bit of a love affair going on. I admit it. I stray emotionally in my other relationships when I get in to that store and browse the cookbooks, the dictionaries, and the novels. And, I think that Half Price Books loves me too. Every year in October, they give me a discount card, entitling me to a bargain all year round. Trust me, in teaching, there are very few perks. It is the hardest job in which everyone is seemingly an expert. Let’s be honest about something. On the one hand, if it were as easy as having visited a doctor’s office a few times for us all to become doctors, we would all be doctors. If though you are among those who think because you had been in a classroom as a student, then you are qualified to teach then you are able to achieve a level of miracle work that I cannot fathom and ask that you keep your distance from me. (I am the jealous sort and I couldn’t handle your greatness, frankly.) On the other hand, Half Price Books, they know how to treat a teacher right. They lure us in with the promise of a good bargain by selling quality books at a reasonable price, and then they seal the deal with an additional discount. It just makes you feel warm inside.

As I was shopping there recently, a former student of mine approached me to thank me for the understanding and compassion that I had shown in the classroom. I teach a class that is required of most students transferring to the university nearby. It is considered a gateway course—in essence, you can’t get in to a program at the university without having come through my classes first. As I stood there at the checkout counter, with my Teacher’s Appreciation Discount Card in hand, I listened to how this person felt that even though she never mastered Spanish as I would have hoped, she did walk away with valuable lessons about learning and education. She reminded me of how often I tell my students that higher education is as much about endurance as it is learning new material. Being a good student takes perseverance, and just a bit of moxie.

Being a good student also takes someone who shows a little faith in you on a personal level. A friend of mine on Facebook, Leslie, has helped me to track down one of my favorite teachers from my childhood. Mrs. Nina Hansen. Mrs. Hansen was my second grade teacher in 1980. In the spirit of Teacher Appreciation, I have sent Mrs. Hansen a letter today to express my admiration for the hard work that she did on my behalf as a child. Teachers never tire of hearing people tell them that they made a difference. I thought I would share my letter here, and encourage you, my readers, to send a letter to one of your former teachers who made a difference.

November 12, 2014

Dear Mrs. Hansen,

I trust that this letter finds you well and in good spirits as yet another Maine winter (all too) quickly approaches. I can say that when I spoke with my father, Robert Wilson, just after Halloween and he recounted his tale of struggling to remove more than ten inches of heavy wet snow from the yard, I felt no pangs of homesickness whatsoever! May you be in a well-insulated house, sheltered from the worst of the cold.

Before I go too far, please allow me to apologize in advance if this letter comes as an intrusion in to your peaceful retirement; if my sleuthing has led me in the right direction, you were formerly a primary school teacher for the MSAD #64. I desire only to express my sincere thanks for a lifetime of fond memories and fine mentoring. To that end, I hope you will accept this letter with my sincerest gratitude.

I grew up in (East) Corinth, Maine, and was a student at the Kenduskeag Elementary School from 1978 until 1981. I was in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan swept his way in to Oval Office, a pupil in your second grade class, having come to you from Mrs. Gloria Hopkin’s first grade group. (I will remind you that I was the only one in my class NOT to have voted for Reagan in the straw poll that fall; my parents could have joined the circus as ‘oddities’ for being Democrats in the very RED Corinth. I still much prefer President Carter’s vision for a more just and fair world!) My twin sister, Melissa, was in Mrs. Johnson’s class across the hall.

Second grade was a magical time. In the classroom that year, we had visits from the nursing staff at the EMMC, a marine biologist who brought the ocean to us one day, and Bethel Dearborn (a delightful church friend of my grandmother) came with some regularity to share the gift of music with us. I can’t hear the song “Let there be Peace on Earth” without being launched back in time to singing with Bethel, and seeing you grade papers at your desk in the back of the room. Second grade was a time for exploration. We were learning to read aloud smoothly and with expression; to work out new words independently; to lose ourselves in good books at least for a little while every day. You had us keep a reading journal, to respond to the literature we had chosen from the collection of books in your classroom, the local Atkins Memorial Library, or from home where Mom kept a steady supply of reading material on hand. When it appeared that the Ginn Level 8, where I had begun the year, proved not to be as challenging as I needed in order to keep my interest, you formed a small group from those of us in the class striving to do more and we read from a text called “The Purple Turtle”. With two different curriculums at play in your classroom, you must have felt more like a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse; I know from experience that those feelings are real and exhausting. I am, though, forever appreciative.

What I cherish most from that time when I was a student in your class was the way that you made me feel valued and encouraged me to be the best James Wilson I could be, to worry less about what the others around me expected me to be. You encouraged me to find my own path to happiness. Moreover, you wrote in my report card at the end of that year that you would miss me for two reasons: first, because I was so eager to meet every new challenge, and secondly, because I was so dependable. I would have done anything for you because you went out of your way to make me feel like being one of the “smart kids” was laudable, not something that should be reproached.

You gave us real lessons in living honestly and authentically. My Mom truly made every effort to be there for us three kids (I also had an older brother, Todd). She participated as chaperone on all school outings; she made cupcakes and other treats for any class bake sales we had. She also tried to make sure that we ate well, even going so far as to send me to school with plates of celery sticks cut up and peanut butter stuffed in to their middles to share with my classmates when we had parties. One day, Mom got a phone call from the school. You were on the line, asking her if she were aware that I was not in the least interested in celery. She admitted that she was unaware of this, and asked how you had ascertained the fact that I (still to this day) have an aversion for the stuff. You replied, “Well, Mrs. Wilson, I have just now caught him burying some of it in the rocks out on the playground!” Mom and I had a talk that night, at your behest, about being honest about things, about being willing to express one’s feelings. She never sent celery to school with me again; I got apples (my favorite) after that.

More importantly still, you also encouraged (and expected) us to be good citizens—to believe that by working together, we could indeed make the world a better place for all. In fact, I still have hanging in my office two little awards that you gave me that year—handmade signs of your appreciation. They are framed now on field of blue with a hint of red trim around the openings.

In the years which have intervened since 1980, I have built a life for myself which I enjoy very much. After graduating high school in 1991, I enrolled as a student at Middlebury College, a private liberal arts college in Vermont, where I specialized in French and Spanish literature with minors in sociology and religion. I remained with Middlebury’s Language Schools where, under their rigorous auspices, I sought a Masters of Arts, later studying for a Doctorate of Modern Languages. My studies led me to live in Paris, France, and Madrid, Spain for a period of years, and afforded me the opportunity to travel and see much of Europe. I am forever changed as a result.

I began teaching in 1996. I have taught the fourth grade, middle school, high school, and since 2000, I have been on the teaching faculty of a technical college in Madison, Wisconsin. There, I give classes in Spanish mostly. I live with my partner of 15 years, Gregory, in an old Victorian on the banks of Lake Monona in the heart of downtown Madison. I am greeted each morning by the sounds of mallard ducks and Canadian geese out on the water; one would hardly know that I am in the center of a city almost four times as large as Portland, Maine (eight times as large as Bangor!).

My teaching style is unique from that of my colleagues. I never managed to master the little square boxes of chronometered activities that my supervisors wanted me to use as a lesson plans. I don’t teach language “one verb tense at a time”; I prefer to layer the exercises on so that they are more organic and build one upon the other. I design lessons based on the “big picture”—my activities are planned for the whole unit and not for the date specific. I encourage my students to build their language skills in meaningful contexts and in ways in which the language is actually spoken.

There isn’t a day that goes by in my job when I don’t think of you. I encourage my students to do their best, to live up to their potential, and to think on their own. I design lesson materials based on the students’ needs and not my own desire to have a well-structured plan book. In short, I too teach in what seems like an open classroom, providing all the tools necessary for learning while demanding that my students rise to the challenge and take charge of their own learning. My students write reading journals at times and practice reading aloud for smoothness and expression. While they may be between the ages of 19 and 70 (since I teach nights), they are involved in many of the same exercises that you had us doing when in your class I was first learning to be a better reader. I hope, in all of my efforts, that I, like you, can instill in my students a love of the written word, and for learning as a lifelong student.

You know only all too well how much those formative years of learning are crucial to the future of children, and also how little thanks comes from the job that you did for so many years. Over time, I have had letters from former students who have felt changed by the work that I did with them, but they are rare. If you’ll permit me, then, let me me be among those who celebrate the good work that you did, and for the positive and meaningful role you have played in my life—even almost thirty-five years later.

I wake up each morning and feel in my very core that I am no longer the eight year old boy with whom you were acquainted, but I hope that the spirit of good citizenship and love for learning that you shared with me then will be with me for the rest of my days. I thank you for all of that, and more.

For all of those hundreds of kids whose lives you touched, but who have never taken the time to write and express their gratitude, know that I value the life lessons you shared with me, and wish you many more years of happy retirement.